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“You have cats?”
“No, I fed the tuna to the goblins who live under the bed.” She rolls her eyes and snorts after, like really snorts, and it turns into a giggle. She’s laughing at her own joke. I like that. I imagine her feeding tuna wraps to monsters under her bed, and I smile too. “Yes, I have cats,” she finally continues.
“How many?” I ask.
“Your granny said it’s an obscene amount.”
“Uh, so like two?”
“No.”
“Three?”
“No.”
“Thirty.”
“Definitely getting colder now.”
“Thirteen?”
“Warmer.”
“Eighty?”
“Okay, you’re not even trying now.”
I can’t hold back a smile. “Just tell me.”
“Four, okay. I have four.”
“Four! Good lord, that’s an obscene amount of cats.”
She makes a sound that sounds like a horse whickering, but I think it’s actually soft laughter. I like the sound of it. Apparently, I’m down for horse whickering any day.
“So you think people will just go for it? Want to hold the creepy necklace like some sort of social experiment?”
“I think so. People love that stuff too. Just look at how many people become famous online by doing pranks or things like street magic,” I answer.
“But this isn’t street magic.”
I waggle my brows. “It could be.”
Lindy shakes her head. She’s smiling softly, though, looking at me without suspicion. It strikes me that it shouldn’t feel this easy between us. We should be more at odds, and she shouldn’t trust me. Maybe it’s a common goal that unites us right now, and after that, she can go back to being abrupt, suspicious, and at odds with me. She can go back to…to…is she really a hacker? Is it more than a hobby? Granny found Lindy for a reason, but how would Granny know that she’s able to make the necklace glow? I mean, Granny does have a sixth sense for this kind of thing, and she is a hopeless romantic, but yeah. What are the odds?
I’m willing to bet that since Granny picked Lindy, it means she’s single. She also appears to have a few things in common with me. She’s techy, and she’s not married, which means that maybe she also has commitment issues. Nope. Granny wouldn’t have gone that far, dug that deep, or chosen someone who wasn’t in the market for me. Would she? Maybe Granny just stopped at single and techy and left the rest up to fate. Or the curse.
“You’re very quiet,” Lindy says after quite a while. I didn’t realize how much time had passed, but suddenly, we’re on the fringes of the French Quarter.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You’re probably thinking about the curse. It deserves some quiet time.”
I park my car next to the curb, and Lindy gets out. I follow. She looks at me askance as we start walking. The streets are busy, teeming. The nightlife in New Orleans is excellent, and the weather is cooperative today. It’s no longer bone-meltingly hot outside, so people have come out in droves.
“It was your idea to come here,” Lindy whispers. “You have to make the first move.” She has a brown leather messenger bag looped over her chest. She lifts the flap and pulls out a set of black gloves. Yes, black gloves! I’m sure she was wearing them last night when she burgled my house. She catches me looking at them and grins. “Did you know you talk about cotton candy in your sleep?”
I have nothing dignified to say to that. Not that I’m one bit ashamed because I’m not. It’s cotton candy. I refuse to apologize for how much I love cotton candy.
“I saw your crazy boxers too. Loved them, by the way.”
“Those were gifts.”
“Yeah, okay. I was just saying.” Lindy grins to herself, and by that, I mean she turns away so she thinks I can’t see her face and how much she doesn’t believe anything I just said.
Thankfully, we run into a large group of ten people coming around the corner. They’re all young, college-aged or so, and when I say we run into, we literally almost run into them because they almost run us over. Lindy has to flatten herself up against a brightly painted yellow building, but I take a chance, remove the necklace from my pocket, and launch into a big spiel about how if it is rubbed the right way, it glows. Yeah, not my finest moment. But I do say it’s a challenge and that not everyone can get it to glow. Since everyone in the crowd appears to be slightly or more than slightly inebriated, they take up the challenge without questioning me about how perverted parts of my speech just sounded. I decide never to say rub it again and instead go with stroke it. Hmm, no, not that either. Feel it? No. Tug? Definitely not. Grasp it tightly? Touch it tentatively? Explore?
Wrong, wrong, and more wrong. I’m going to have to work on this.
